Goodbye
by Scimitarmoon
Summary: A short story of the rose that lay on the grave of Christine de Changy and who put it there.


Summary: this is the epilogue of a tale of the Phantom of the Opera, and of the little red rose found by the Vicomte De Chagney on the grave of his dead wife.

The passing of time is so swift some of us hardly notice it. That is why they say that life's too short. Seasons change like passing clouds and as you blink the years go by, so that you are not aware of their passing at all. But some brief moments in time can last longer than a thousand lifetimes. Time is a strange thing indeed. It crawls when you watch every moment, but when your attention is momentarily averted it will run swiftly.

These past few years had gone _so_ fast, because they had been so good to him. And there had been so many before them that had been like Chinese Water Torture, but much worse.

Eons of loneliness, and then a girl, a woman, who had been so out of reach. Now she was gone. They were gone. They belonged to the past.

It was a cold winter morning, but Paris ran on unhindered by the season, outside the stony graveyard, beyond the iron bars that seemed to imprison time. There was not a breath of air, and the dead trees stood amongst the tombs and gravestones so quietly, as they must have done for tens of years. But here seconds, minutes and hours all merged. It was impossible to tell how little, or how much time had passed. The sky was pale grey, and it was impossible to tell where the sun was in the sky.

She had come here many times before. So many dead, so many names of people that Sarah had never met in life or death, but she was looking for someone. It would be last day she would where black. Tomorrow, she would shed her black dress and cloak, her dark veil of mourning and the black armband, and she would not grieve anymore. It had been long enough.

He had come to the end of his sorry life a few years ago now. The 19th of September, 1916, a bright autumn's day, five o clock in the afternoon just after dinner. She had sat with his head in her lap, outside their house, watching the sun modestly creep behind the trees. It had been a calm day, he'd been very serene that day, and she supposed that he had been anticipating it. After all, he'd been ill for a while, it was inevitable.

His passing had been peaceful, Sarah had not noticed his dying until his hands had become rigid and cold. Life had been severely unkind to him, but his death was probably more compassionate than any man deserved. She just hoped that what lay beyond was kinder still. She had waited for the soft breeze to cool and the bright clouds to darken in anticipation for rain before she had carried him inside and laid him down on his bed. He had always been very small; extremely lithe, and just a little shorter than she; especially in frailty he was light enough to be carried by a fairly strong woman.

She had not cried until it had got very dark. Nerves frayed by the strenuous work of caring for a dying man who was now finally dead, she had cried all night, and ridden all the way to the nearest town to fetch a mortician while a close friend of hers had sat with the body.

The funeral service had been nice too. Sarah had accepted her own grief and wore black, and had done since; her friend wore black also for it is tradition, but the other three who came did not. The two sisters whom he had met at a convention in the south of France said that he would have found it terribly droll. They could always be relied upon to bring smiles to the faces all everyone around them, even at a funeral! Always vulgar and terribly inappropriate, Erik would have loved it.

The other fellow who turned up was of the shy, silent sort whose intelligence was close to rivalling Erik's, and he had never been able to make friends previously either, but for different reasons. Geniuses, she had been told, were often had very poor behaviour and social abilities. She'd seen plenty of that in Erik, but was sure that he'd been that way because of the way he looked. How other people treated him.

He'd been very much alone until coming across her- a lost child, now a lost woman who had also a habit of wearing a mask to avoid the horror of the human race.

She to off her veil, and then her black ivory mask, and knelt down in the snow. Sarah had found her. Amidst the monotonous grey headstones of long gone Parisians, the marble angel with faces eternally frozen in sadness; the little plaques for babies who died from poverty, and the grand tombs of the rich: there she was. Another dead woman, whose name was not lost to Sarah. The object of his love, the root of all his pain. He had always loved her more than he had loved Sarah. The named woman she'd never met, who'd danced for a living, and sung, and married a rich man. She might have forgotten his love for her, but he certainly didn't. Sarah had always been terribly jealous. This dead woman was given a man's heart, but she didn't want it; Sarah would have been glad to take it, and give something in return, but her success was not enough to make him forget. Of course he'd loved her, as a daughter as he'd often said; but Christine…ah, if he could have anything in the world! In his later years he'd really accepted what he could not have. He had no pined for her for a long time, he'd even gone to throw her ring into the Seine, but he never threw away his love.

It didn't matter any more. Tracing the printed name with a finger, she retrieved something from her cloak, and looked at it intently. It was his favourite flower, she'd bought it form the same flower seller he always saw on many trips to Paris. He'd always put them on the graves of the dead he felt he owed something to. Mainly, it was because of him they were dead in the first place. Or he gave them to people he really loved. Sometimes he'd leave one on Christine's doorstep –but not to often, because it might upset her- one for Sarah on her birthday. Now she gave one to his headstone on the anniversary of his passing.

Red as blood from a weeping heart, sharp as the nails of the hand that squeezes it. A black ribbon- always for the dead. She kissed it and laid it to the side. If this was the anniversary of Christine's death people might come to visit, and they would not know who it was from.

Lastly, she looked at her hand. Today, she was saying goodbye; she allowed herself to shed a few tears, for there would be no more after that, slowly she removed the little gold band from her left hand. Bought by a man for the woman he loved, then returned so that he might remember her and not feel so alone. She didn't need it anymore; she would never have to think of the woman again, and she needed not think of how the man had remembered her. Carefully she slipped it onto the stem of the rose and over the ribbon.

"Goodbye Christine, you can have this back. I suppose he really was yours all along."

And that was it. She offered a final, silent prayer before standing, and reading the name and dates again. 'Beloved wife and mother'. She remained stalwart for some time, before moving sombrely through the graveyard to pay respects to three dead men whom Erik had owed a great deal. It snowed briefly, again, removing all of the evidence of her being there

The rose, sheltered under the truth betray itself; erubescent amongst the plain tones of the graveyard. The ring, sparkled like an angels tear.

Before going she watched a little group of people go to that grave from the shadow of a tree- so they could not see her. The man in a wheelchair laid something down in the snow, a little box that played a familiar tune that echoed through the silence. It was just as he had described, and the sound was just as crisp as it must have been so many years ago.

Then, he saw it. Modestly hidden in the shade, frozen for a moment in time; it seemed to shine like fine glazed porcelain as the sun peeped momentarily for a niche in the clouds. As she turned, and glided into the living world, Sarah wondered who the old man would think it was from.


End file.
